The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880

By Borbala Zsuzsanna Török

The formation of modern European states during the long 19th century was a complicated process, challenged by the integration of widely different territories and populations. The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 builds on recent research to investigate the history of statistics as an overlooked part of the sciences of the state in Habsburg legal education as well as within the broader public sphere. By exploring the practices and social spaces of statistics, author Borbála Zsuzsanna Török uncovers its central role in imagining the composite Habsburg Monarchy as a modern and unified administrative space.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805395553

Borbala Zsuzsanna Török

Borbala Zsuzsanna Török is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Austrian Historical Studies, University of Vienna. She is the author of Exploring Transylvania: Geographies of Knowledge and Entangled Histories of a Multiethnic Province, 1790–1914 (Brill, 2015). She co-edited Berechnen/Beschreiben: Praktiken statistischen (Nicht-)Wissens 1750–1850 (Duncker & Humblot, 2015) with Gunhild Berg and Marcus Twellmann, as well as Negotiating Knowledge in Early-Modern Empires: A Decentered View (Palgrave, 2014) with László Kontler, Antonella Romano, and Silvia Sebastiani.

Book preview

The Science of State Power

in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1880

New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies

Published in association with the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Marburg, Germany

Series Editors

Peter Haslinger, Director

Heidi Hein-Kircher, Head of the Department Academic Forum

Decades after the political changes that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe remains one of the most misunderstood parts of the world. With a special focus on the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies investigates the historical and social forces that have shaped the region, from ethnicity and religion to imperial legacies and national conflicts. Each volume in the series explores these and many other topics to contribute to a better understanding of Central and Eastern Europe today.

Volume 5

The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1880

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

Volume 4

The Middle-Income Trap in Central and Eastern Europe: Causes, Consequences and Strategies in Post-Communist Countries

Edited by Yaman Kouli and Uwe Müller

Volume 3

The World beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe

Edited by Mariusz Kałczewiak and Magdalena Kozłowska

Volume 2

Heritage under Socialism: Preservation in Eastern and Central Europe, 1945–1991

Edited by Eszter Gantner, Corinne Geering, and Paul Vickers

Volume 1

Rampart Nations: Bulwark Myths of East European Multiconfessional Societies in the Age of Nationalism

Edited by Liliya Berezhnaya and Heidi Hein-Kircher

The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790–1880

Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

First published in 2024 by

Berghahn Books

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© 2024 Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

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A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2024934506

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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ISBN 978-1-80539-554-6 hardback

ISBN 978-1-80539-555-3 epub

ISBN 978-1-80539-556-0 web pdf

https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805395546

Contents

List of Illustrations

Concordance of Place Names

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Public and Arcane Statistical Knowledge (1770s–1820)

Chapter 2. Statistics in the Legal Curricula (1790s–1860s)

Chapter 3. Regional Statistical Practices (1790s–1848)

Chapter 4. Descriptive Statistics and the Political Space of the Monarchy (1840s–1850s)

Chapter 5. The Eclipse of Descriptive Statistics (1850s–1880s)

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Tables

2.1. Estimates of territorial extent and population figures in various works comprising Transylvania.

3.1. Overview of the contents of Anton von Baldacci’s Topographic-Statistical Outline of Galicia, 1801

3.2. Categories used by gazetteers for describing manorial estates.

3.3. Categories used by gazetteers for describing rural settlements.

3.4. Categories used by gazetteers for describing urban settlements.

Figures

2.1. Most often-cited authors, 1790–1869.

2.2. Most frequently cited publications, 1770–1867.

2.3. Cited publications by medium, 1790–1869.

3.1. Joachim Bedeus, Diagram of the territorial distribution of the Hungarian, Székely, and Saxon counties in Transylvania, AS Sibiu, Romania, Fond Bedeus, no. 36, 2. Photo © AS Sibiu, used with permission.

3.2. August Friedrich Wilhelm Crome, Ratio map of the German Confederation. p. 154. Wikimedia Commmons, public domain.

4.1. Street statistics of the Habsburg monarchy, 1838. Austrian National Archives, AT-OeStA/KA KPS LB K VII a, 46. Photo © OESTA, used with permission.

Concordance of Place Names

Many of the place names in the book have several varieties in the vernacular languages: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (BCMS); Czech (CZ); (Austrian) German (DE); Hungarian (HU); Italian (IT); Polish (PO); Romanian (RO); Slovak (SK); Slovene (SL); Ukrainian (UA). Many of them are located today in the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy. The book uses the varieties found in the sources and used by the persons, whose activities are in the focus of analysis.

Bratislava (SK); Pozsony (HU); Pressburg/Preßburg (DE)

Budapest (HU); Budapešť (SK); Budapesta (RO); Budimpešta (BCSM; SL)

České Budějovice (CZ); Budweis (DE)

Cluj-Napoca (RO); Klausenburg (DE); Kolozsvár (HU)

Debrecen (HU); Debreţin (RO); Debrezin (DE)

Esztergom (HU); Gran (DE); Ostrihom (SK)

Graz (DE); Gradec (SL)

Győr (HU); Raab (DE)

Klagenfurt (DE); Celovec (SL)

Košice (SK); Kaschau (DE); Kassa (HU)

Kotor (BCMS); Cattaro (IT)

Kroměříž (CZ); Kremsier (DE)

Lviv (UA); Lemberg (DE); Lwów (PL)

Maribor (SL); Marburg (DE)

Mediaş (RO); Medgyes (HU); Mediasch/Medwisch (DE)

Odorheiu Secuiesc (RO); Oderhellen (DE); Székelyudvarhely (HU)

Oradea (RO); Großwardein (DE); Nagyvárad (HU); Veľký Varadín (SK)

Ptuj (SL); Pettau (DE)

Rijeka (BCMS); Fiume (IT)

Sibiu (RO); Hermannstadt (DE); Nagyszeben (HU)

Trieste (IT); Triest (DE); Trst (BCMS; SL)

Zagreb (BCMS); Agram (DE); Zágráb (HU)

Acknowledgments

This book has been the result of a long academic peregrination. The idea to do research on descriptive statistics from a history of science perspective goes back to my early postdoctoral years first at the European University Institute in Florence and then at Central European University in Budapest. The inclusive social gaze of this knowledge field seemed intriguing at a time when mainstream research was dissecting history writing as the discipline of nation-building in the 2000s. Being part of the research network Space and Science: Power, Networks, and the Dynamics of Knowledge from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment opened my eyes to the ways early modern empires across the globe saw the social realm and organized knowledge about it. I feel privileged and grateful for the exchange with Antonella Romano, László Kontler, Kapil Raj, Hans-Erich Bödeker, Silvia Sebastiani, Catherine Jami, and Stéphane Van Damme over many years, in many places. A larger workshop connected to the activities of this network was sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

In the meantime, the idea had developed into a research project, endorsed by the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz and funded by the German Research Fund. It was a deep dive into cross- and multi-disciplinarity and above all into German academic and project management. I am most obliged to Giovanni Galizia and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker for their valuable advice during my years at the Zukunftskolleg, to Anda Lohan and Mathias Graf for their sense of humor and technical support, and to my colleagues Gunhild Berg and Marcus Twellmann at the Zukunftskolleg for thinking together on eighteenth-century science. Membership of the Leibniz Graduate School for Cultures of Knowledge in Central European Transnational Contexts—later Herder Institute Research Academy at the Herder-Institute in Marburg (Lahn), Germany—brought more possibilities of polishing ideas and developing chapters of the book. I am grateful for the support of the institute’s director, Peter Haslinger, and for the cooperation with my colleagues there—particularly Heidi Hein-Kircher, the late Eszter Gantner, Jana Piňosová, and Jan Surman.

An extended version of the project, which placed Habsburg state-formation in focus, was financed by the Austrian Research Fund and brought me to Vienna, thanks to Peter Becker, Thomas Winkelbauer, and Philipp Ther. I am particularly indebted to them for endorsing my endeavor as the basis of my habilitation at the University of Vienna and advising me throughout my years here. Marianne Klemun in particular and my colleagues Thomas Wallnig, Brooke Penaloza-Patzak, Thomas Stockinger, and Johannes Mattes commented and helped improve the ensuing chapters. Cooperation with the book project Lower Austria in the Nineteenth Century, directed by Stefan Emminger, Oliver Kühschelm, Elisabeth Loinig, and Willibald Rosner, led me to the treasure troves of the regional archives and connected me with many colleagues from Austria and beyond. Stefan Ebner and Susanne Zenker at the University of Vienna helped me develop a quantitative analysis of the descriptive statistical material, which opened the topic toward the digital humanities.

A visiting fellowship at the IOS-Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies helped me wrap up the material, thanks above all to Guido Hausmann, who energetically pushed the project toward a quick and safe closure. In the framework of the habilitation process, the reviews by László Kontler, Christine Lebeau, and Labbé Morgane, and the two anonymous reviewers at Berghahn, helped me mold the manuscript into its final form. After initial copyediting by Thomas Szerecz, Tim Page engaged vigorously with the language, weeding out nineteenth-century German terminology and leaving me to ponder the translatability of terms. The editing was supported by the Austrian Academy of Science, for which I am indebted to Mitchell G. Ash. The translation of the German and Hungarian sources are mine.

The book engages with the nature of encyclopedic knowledge about the state, which defies easy categorization. The topic sits between many disciplines, each of which may offer their own point of entry. I hope my interpretation will succeed in bringing it closer to the readers and inspiring further research in this knowledge field.

Introduction

Statistics: 1. the science of the natural and political constitution of a state; 2. a book in which this science is taught.

—Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig, 1801), 4:304.

About statistics as an independent science there abound the most diverse opinions; indeed, there are quite a few, who utterly deny any scientific character of it. The confusion is limitless, it encompasses even the basic notions on which the scientific status of (statistics) is built. There is disagreement about the field, disagreement about the task and disagreement about the method of statistics.

—Joseph Hain, Handbuch der Statistik des Österreichischen Kaiserstaates Part 1., Vol. 1 (Vienna: Tendler & Compagnie, 1852), 1.

The integration of heterogeneous territories and populations posed a major challenge to modern European state formation. The process required measuring, delimiting, and exploring these territories and controlling them by means of administrative, legal, and educational structures. All over the world, the state had many facets: it was both an organization of control and a resource to mobilize manpower and finance. At the same time, the state was also an idea, an expression of an aspiration for territorial sovereignty, whether in the name of a supreme ruler, territorial elites, or the people.¹ The organization and the idea of the modern state was based on empirical knowledge about space: its geographic and topographic characteristics, boundaries, population, natural resources, economic production, educational and welfare institutions, and the legal and administrative system. Knowledge about these diverse realms constituted the domain of an academic discipline that emerged in the early eighteenth-century German universities. Its name was Statistik or Staatenkunde, which translates into English as statistics. However, eighteenth-century German academic statistics differed from our understanding of statistics, which is based on large, mostly numerical data sets. It was also different from the mathematical forerunners of modern statistics, developing in England under the name of political arithmetic or probability calculus. Statistik was a comparative and encyclopedic science of individual states; it provided standardized descriptions of their territories, governments, populations, economies, and administration. The descriptions were published in a book format, and by bringing the material together, it was possible to study the structural similarities between different states. It was the transformation of this discipline in the first half of the nineteenth century and its amalgamation with other knowledge fields—such as political arithmetic, probability calculus, and various forms of bureaucratic knowledge—which led to establishment of statistics as an administrative science, also used today.²

This book traces the transformation of this descriptive or academic statistics following its introduction as a university discipline in Habsburg legal education in the 1770s until major disciplinary changes and its ensuing eclipse in the 1880s.³ It starts from the observation that practices of statistics were not confined to academia but were subsequently published in various institutional and social contexts throughout the lands of the monarchy. While research on the history of modern statistics has focused on its origins and theoretical anchorage in German academia and its radical transformation after the Napoleonic Wars into a numerical administrative science, my book has been triggered by a different story. The evidence suggests that the encyclopedic science of the state had a much longer life in the Habsburg lands, until the 1880s. Given that the discipline was supposedly theoretically defunct by the mid-nineteenth century, what explains its longevity in the Habsburg monarchy? The book claims that state descriptions did not simply convey public data about the state but made the Habsburg composite state legible to a broad audience by making its diverse regions comparable and commensurable. State descriptions helped their readers think about the space of the monarchy not only as a juxtaposition of territories but as a corresponding, contiguous space. Studying the history of statistics as a scholarly practice allows insight into contemporary ideas of Habsburg statehood.

The history of descriptive or academic statistics has so far been studied predominantly as an introductory chapter of administrative statistics and political economy, or the history of how nationalist movements used statistical data to justify their claims to specific territories in the nineteenth century.⁴ But given the uninterrupted use of this discipline as a knowledge practice by the broader scholarly public of the Habsburg monarchy for nearly a century, this book focuses on the idea as well as the practical and conceptual knowledge of the state that it conveyed to its readers. What were the characteristics of this knowledge? How did statistics represent the composite Habsburg state? Who were its practitioners? Where and how were descriptive statistical books written? What kind of information did they gather and create, and what were their scientific and political premises? Did the knowledge delivered by state descriptions contribute to the integration of the Habsburg territories?

The book consequently focuses on the historical analysis of practices of statistics as an academic discipline, a descriptive science of the state in the Habsburg monarchy. Its form was different from later administrative statistics, collected by governmental offices and the statistical bureaus from 1800 onward. Contemporaries referred to both practices as Statistik, and in order to prevent misunderstandings, the book will translate its early scholarly form as academic or descriptive statistics, while the other form will be called administrative statistics. Descriptive statistics defined the state by means of both quantifiable parameters and qualitative descriptions, comprising definitions of political rule and its material and human resources; the central, local, and intermediate levels of administration and legislation; the social and economic sphere; and geography. This state was led in an impersonal manner, based on empirical, verifiable, and rational methods of governance that, in theory, offered themselves to public scrutiny.⁵

This book inquiries into the practical and scholarly factors that allowed descriptive statistics to thrive in the lands of the Habsburg monarchy before and after the creation of the Austrian statistical bureau in 1829. This parallel career of descriptive statistics and statistical bureaus deserves more attention: academic statistics was a field of public knowledge, while statistical offices set up in Europe in the first half of the century initially collected numerical and other kind of information solely for the internal use of the state bureaucracy. This book is therefore also an attempt at a more pluralistic view of the historiography of statistics.

As the following sections and chapters will show, the descriptions provided by academic statistics were not neutral—by documenting the strength and weaknesses of a state at a certain historical moment, the aim was to make governance more efficient. Its normative perspective made it into a tool for increasing the fiscal and military power of the state, yet we still know little about the uses of this tool in the Habsburg lands. The book consequently seeks to contribute to the cultural history of modern Habsburg state formation, the irregular structure of which has continued to intrigue historians up to the present day.⁶

The book’s thesis is that descriptions of the Habsburg state contributed to a shared epistemology of statehood while enabling the public articulation of various and even conflicting views on administrative and political facts, from the relative population density of various regions to their economic strength, from the tasks and legitimacy of the central government to the power of regional elites, and from the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the nations inhabiting the regions of the monarchy to the topography of these spaces. This shared epistemology contributed to a vision of the composite state as a united legal space with comparable and compatible administrative units. This state was, of course, an empirical construct, framed by a common classificatory scheme at the basis of state descriptions.⁷ The unitary vision of descriptive statistics helped its readers navigate a world that until the institutionalization of the liberal legal order in the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy in 1867 and even beyond was determined by enormous social and legal diversity.

My book thus inquires into the functioning, relevance, and production of descriptive statistics as an intellectual toolkit of the composite Habsburg state in the period following the educational reforms of Empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780) and her son, Joseph II (1741–1790). It claims that statistics had this potential since its empirical definition of the state was comprehensible to the broader public in all the lands of the monarchy. The book charts its production and lifetime as well as its use in various institutional and geographic contexts well into the second half of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Leitha river and in a comparative European context. The following two sections of the introduction address the two main historiographical traditions to which descriptive statistics belongs: the sciences of the state and administrative statistics. It also indicates the double ties of early statistics to scholarship and science on the one hand and to administrative practice on the other. The third section engages with the history of modern state-building and approaches to the nature of the Habsburg composite state in the European and global context.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the emerging bureaucratic state was chipping away at the autonomies of traditional provincial self-governments. State descriptions recorded this transformation and were used as the basis for further political reforms. We have a general notion about the ethos and educational background of Habsburg state bureaucrats, about their approximate concepts of the state, and this book contributes to a more detailed assessment of their empirical knowledge of the complex topic of the state.⁸ Since a large part of descriptive statistics served the education of future public officials, while another significant body of state descriptions was penned by them while in office,⁹ this book is also a contribution to a deeper understanding of their intellectual horizons and political subjectivities.

From Universities to Reading Societies: Spaces of Descriptive Statistical Knowledge

The university discipline of statistics generated knowledge about the state as a historical and empirical phenomenon. Together with other disciplines, it was part of the novel German sciences of the state that sought to inform modern administrative policies with regard to the specific sociolegal order, governance, and historical development of various different polities.¹⁰ The other disciplines that were to provide methodical and empirical knowledge about the science of ruling included natural law, cameralist political economy, state prudence (Staatsklugheit), the study of administration (Policey), state law, and the history of particular states.

Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772), professor at the University of Göttingen, established statistics as an empirical science of the state.¹¹ His textbooks served as the methodological basis for the Habsburg legal curriculum until the 1830s. Similar to the German states, the sciences of the state were introduced into the legal training of Habsburg universities by the reformed university curriculum (1752–1754) initiated during the reign of Maria Theresa. This was the time when legal training became a prerequisite for entry to public service.¹² The curriculum assigned five professors to the law faculty at the University of Vienna, of which two chairs were dedicated to the sciences of the state, including statistics. The first course in statistics at the University of Vienna was established by Joseph Aloys von Leporini in 1768/69.¹³

Academic statistics was rooted in the Enlightenment philosophy of improvement, but it also absorbed earlier reason of state literature together with newer teachings such as those conveyed by the treatise Anti-Machiavel by the Prussian king Frederick II, according to which empirical knowledge about the strength and weaknesses of a state led to efficient administration and fostered the public good.¹⁴ Its encyclopedic rendering of the material, social, and legal setup of a polity made it essential for the teaching of state law both in the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, statistical knowledge was not only part of the university curricula but also played an important role in the private education of Prussian and Austrian statesmen, including the future emperor Joseph II.¹⁵

Descriptive statistics was a university discipline that facilitated the comparative study of states with regard to their relative strength.¹⁶ The latter was either material and quantifiable or immaterial and describable, comprising the virtues necessary for governing. The structure followed a predefined taxonomy. As the following chapters will show, behind the seemingly neutral enlisting, cataloging, and numerical or qualitative rendering of statistical facts—that is, empirically proven interpreted data—each author was discernible according to his scholarly and political affinities (in the period under scrutiny, statistics was pursued only by men). But the core of the practice consisted in the definition, collection, and empirical rendering of statistical facts. The authors of statistical handbooks and manuals were often self-conscious about the precision of their descriptions and pondered about the reliability of their accounts, creating networks of communication and data exchange spanning across and even beyond the regions they described.¹⁷

The encyclopedic scope of descriptive statistics meant that it was not only a discipline but also a broader knowledge field that conveyed empirical information from a variety of university disciplines and other, extracurricular domains of scholarly knowledge. State law, the sciences of the state, geography, ethnography, and sociology claim it as part of their historical genealogies. German legal historical scholarship has long dealt with the contribution of academic statistics to the shaping of modern public law, while in Austria research on this topic has been much more recent.¹⁸ The development of legal knowledge in the framework of academic statistics is not the subject of this monograph but rather the general empirical approach to the material constitution of statehood, as addressed by the sciences of the state and later modern administrative statistics. The disciplinary historiography locates it in the context of the German sciences of the state and the emergence of the reformed German universities of the eighteenth century: first Halle, then, later, Göttingen.¹⁹ In both cases, it was the governmentalization of the university that contributed to the emancipation of the secular fields of knowledge, including cameralist economy, administrative and legal disciplines, the history of states and statistics.²⁰ The Austrian legal historian Martin Schennach argues that the career of descriptive statistics is inseparable from Habsburg state-building, manifested in the legal and administrative steps toward the integration of the lands of the composite monarchy that began with the reign of Maria Theresa in 1740.²¹

Studies on the overlap between descriptive statistics, geography, and topography indicate how important the representation of space as a closely bounded territory was for the shaping of the discipline in the last decades of the eighteenth century.²² This is visible in the early theoretical works by the German gymnasium professor Anton Friedrich Büsching (1724–1793) and the Göttingen professors Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799) and August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809), whose methods were later emulated in France, the Italian states, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Russia, and the Habsburg universities (see also the statistical analysis of frequently quoted authors in chapter 2).²³ The emerging topographic-statistical offices in the German states and France of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries also produced topographic descriptions of administrative territories (crownlands, districts, localities). The contemporary overlap between geography and descriptive statistics was so strong that, as chapter 3 will show, authors of statistical handbooks in the Habsburg territories regarded state descriptions and geography as mutually complementary fields.²⁴

The institutionalization of descriptive statistics in the Habsburg provincial universities corresponded to the consolidation of the state bureaucracy as an institution independent of the church, the estate-based local administration, and the military. State descriptions were produced in all the Habsburg lands for students of law, many of them future bureaucrats, who also read them while in office. As the following chapters will show, creating knowledge about the state was not confined to higher education.

As well as the Habsburg universities in Vienna, Innsbruck, Lemberg, Pest, and Prague, and the Italian universities of Pavia and Padua, academic statistics was also taught in legal and professional academies, Protestant colleges, and Catholic lycées. From around the last decade of the eighteenth century, learned journals increasingly brought statistical information to a broader educated readership, and statistical-topographic gazetteers and handbooks were written by clerks, military, and administrative personnel and independent authors writing for the market. In the 1840s, as public debates about Habsburg political reforms were permitted, these works were used as repositories of factual knowledge about their scientific object, the state. A historical analysis of descriptive statistics reveals a social practice that transcended the realm of education and even the bureaus. This practice was characterized by different means of information-gathering and formats than its academic counterpart.

Complicating the analysis is the uneven dynamics of the lands of the composite monarchy, which by the mid-nineteenth century had produced a dual-state settlement, characterized by diverging strategies in political administration, nation-building, and economic integration. Statistics described the central, local, and intermediate levels of the administration; the social and geographic sphere; the rudiments of the legal system; and the economy. As state descriptions were usually completed by a single author and mostly about one particular province of the monarchy, the exception being select members of the university elite who wrote about the entire polity, these works were continually rewritten to register changes accumulated over time. As a result, the tedious data sets combine into historical sediments of publicly available knowledge about the composite state, the intellectual sources, variations, and geographic distribution of which provide valuable insights into how public servants and authors in diverse social contexts construed their state in comparison to what they wished to see in the period from the failed reforms of Emperor Joseph II to the creation of the Austro-Hungarian dualist state.

As a widely traveled bureaucrat, Vienna-born Joseph Rohrer (1769–1828) was in many ways a typical author of Habsburg descriptive statistics. Rohrer’s family originated in Moravia. He attended Gymnasium in Innsbruck and then started a career in public administration in Vorarlberg before transferring to Vienna in 1796 and later to Lemberg in Galicia in 1800.²⁵ Eight years later, he was teaching administrative science and statistics at the Lyceum, later University of Lemberg (in 1816), a position he held until his retirement in 1827.

Like many similar authors, Rohrer mostly published travel literature and ethnographic descriptions of various Austrian lands. However, he also wrote a statistical description of the entire monarchy, which he probably used when teaching his university course.²⁶ This latter publication was unusual, as the writing of all-encompassing works and not just about one province was the duty and privilege of the professoriate of the Viennese university and a few select members of the military, the topic of chapters 2 and 3. Rohrer’s explanation of his own motives was also unusual for an academic in that he claimed to have personally visited all the provinces he described. Moreover, he appealed to patriotic love and appreciation, which was supposedly only able to grow out of precise knowledge of the fatherland.²⁷ The language of patriotic love was not typical to the academic treatises on statistics written by university professors but was more often to be found in the learned journals where Rohrer had frequently published.²⁸

Indeed, descriptive statistics was practiced in variegated intellectual environments in all the Habsburg lands and provinces. Statistical handbooks of a particular province were mostly written by professors in higher education, teaching in the respective crownland but also by private and public administrators and interested intellectuals.²⁹ But they could be compiled in the private libraries of former military and administrative personnel, as well as the first public libraries of reading societies and aristocratic mentors, who helped the authors span networks of information exchange with administrative offices and members of the church. The spatial turn—which has explored the impact of social, geographic, topographic, and material dimensions of knowledge formation—offers a differentiated perspective on the effect of different geographic and social contexts on the practice of descriptive statistics³⁰ and has laid the foundation upon which the contribution of descriptive statistics to the epistemology of the state in the Habsburg spaces and places can be analyzed.³¹ This approach helps differentiate the institutional and social contexts in which handbooks about the state were produced and allows us to inquire into the impact of these locales on knowledge production.

Historians of geography have been particularly active contributors to the spatial turn in the history of sciences, highlighting the epistemological shifts through cartographic explorations of the globe. They have contributed to our heightened sense of the impact of specific social and geographic configurations on the production of knowledge and its local character before it transformed into more universal and shared systems and norms of information.³² The spatial turn is also useful for establishing the central, territorial, and local scales of statistical knowledge production. The book therefore traces the biography of an Enlightenment academic discipline as a social practice in its various contexts, looking at its uses and its changing forms over time and space.

This study comparatively analyzes the production and use of descriptive statistics in various lands of the composite Habsburg monarchy. How did regionally and centrally placed authors perceive the state, including the size, political integration, and social composition of the regions? Was there any difference between professors of the discipline in Vienna and freelance practitioners in the provinces? In order to do justice to the heterogeneity of the Habsburg polity, the study selected representative case studies from four lands located in the three separate administrative regions of the monarchy, governed by distinct Court Chancelleries: Lower Austria, Styria, Hungary and Transylvania. The analysis took into consideration sites of higher education as well as locales of the broader scholarly public. The production of statistical knowledge in the provinces has been compared to similar activity in the metropolitan heart, Vienna, which hosted the central and most prestigious university of the monarchy.³³ However, the analysis did not take any hierarchy of the educational or administrative system for granted, but followed the production of theoretical knowledge and statistical information in various locales and its circulation and incorporation in the broader descriptive statistical literature. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with this question in more detail.

The book does not explicitly address the Czech lands, Galicia and Bucovina, or the Italian regions. The reasons are partly practical: similarly detailed microstudies and comparative analyses as those conducted in the selected places of knowledge production would have required an additional decade of work to the one invested in the study so far. More important is another argument of a theoretical kind: my considerations about the theory and methods of descriptive statistics, inspired by the excellent work of Silvana Patriarca on Italy and the analyses of Morgane Labbè on the epistemology of descriptive statistics in relation to maps, are considered as being valid for all the Habsburg lands.

The difference between statistics written by university professors and nonacademics was not only one of emotions. Authors from the latter sphere, especially after the loosening of censorship or in works published abroad, were also more vocal about their political opinions, as the case studies presented in chapter 4 will show. Further significant differences had to be reckoned with when investigating patronage and local enthusiasm for statistics in the well-integrated, economically well-off Austrian crownlands and the much more aloof and economically lesser developed regions, like the Hungarian kingdom, tax-exempt until 1848, and Transylvania. Even in the latter two cases significant differences could be registered in the first half of the nineteenth century, based on language and the position of the authors in the educational, administrative, and military system. These differences in the regional practices are significant and certainly merit further comparative research in the Czech lands, Galicia, the Italian regions, and Dalmatia.

My goal is to demonstrate that by adopting the language and facts of statistics, even the most context-specific political claims came to be legitimated by reference to statistical facts by the mid-nineteenth century, regardless of the political field they targeted and from which crownland or kingdom they emerged. This is also the core argument of chapter 4, which focuses on specific political disputes between Austrian and Hungarian experts and statesmen from the 1840s to the 1850s. Underlying these debates was a general classificatory structure and statistical data that shaped the gaze of the practitioners. The finer regional adaptations of the theoretical basis of descriptive statistics can be tested in further regional and local studies, and the hope exists that the book will generate more research on these matters.

Descriptive versus Administrative Statistics

According to the classical narrative, encyclopedic state descriptions were the forerunner of modern quantitative statistics. The Napoleonic Wars and the rise of modern quantitative statistics in the practice of statistical bureaus, the first of which was founded in France in 1800, exposed the epistemological and methodological shortcomings of the encyclopedic method and allegedly ushered in the decline of the discipline. Accordingly, it was modern numerical administrative statistics, connected with the historical development of the modern state bureaucracy and its administrative routines, that marked the onset of the statistical age in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.³⁴ The latter has been associated with large